Automated tour design in the Saturnian system

Abstract

Future missions to Enceladus would benefit from multi-moon tours that leverage \(V_\infty \) on resonant orbits to progressively transfer between moons. Such resonance hopping trajectories present a vast search space for global optimization due to the different combinations of available resonances and flyby velocities. The proposed multi-objective tour design algorithm optimizes entire moon tours from Titan to Enceladus via grid-based dynamic programming, in which the computation time is significantly reduced by discretization of the design variables and pre-computation of a database of \(V_\infty \)-leveraging transfers. The result unveils a complete trade space of the moon tour design to Enceladus, and the obtained solution is validated in a full-ephemeris model.